What's the chance that the breath you just inhaled contains at least one air molecule that was in Julius Caesar's last breath--the one in which he said (according to Shakespeare) "Et tu Brute? Then die Caesar"?​

Assume that the more than two thousand years that have passed have been enough time for all the molecules in Caesar's last breath to mix evenly in the atmosphere, and that only a trivial amount of the molecules have leaked out into the oceans or the ground. Assume further that there are about 1044 molecules of air, and about 2 x 1022molecules in each breath--yours or Caesar's.​

That gives a chance of 2 x 1022/1044 = 2x 10-22 that any one particular molecule you breathe in came from Caesar's last breath. This means that the probability that any one particular molecule did not come from Caesar's last breath is [1-2x10-22]. But we want the probability that the first molecule did not come from Caesar's last breath and that the second molecule and that the third molecule and so forth. To determine the probability of not just one thing but of a whole bunch of things that are causally unconnected happening together, we multiply the individual probabilities. Since there are 2x10-22 different molecules, and since each has the same [1-2x10-22] chance of not coming from Caesar's last breath, we need to multiply the probability of any single event--[1-2x10-22]--by itself 2x1022 times. That gives us:​

[1-2x10-22][2x10^22]​

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as the probability that none of the molecules in the breath you just inhaled (assuming you are still holding out) came from Julius Caesar's last breath.​

How to evaluate this? Recall that if a number x is small, then (1-x) is approximately equal to e-x, where e=2.718281828... is the so-called base of the natural logarithms. So we can rewrite the equation above as:​

[e[-2x10^(-22)]][2x10^(22)]​

​

And remember that when we raise numbers with exponents to further exponents, we simply multiply the exponents together. In this case, one exponent (the chance that a molecule came from Caesar) is very small, and the other (the number of molecules in a breath) is very large. When we multiply them together, we get: [-2x10(-22)] x [2x10(22)] = -4. e-4 is approximately 1/(2.72 x 2.72 x 2.72 x 2.72) = 1/54.7 = 0.018.​

Thus there is a 1.8% chance that none of the molecules you are (still) holding in your lungs came from Caesar's last breath. And there is a 98.2% chance that at least one of the molecules in your lungs came from Caesar's last breath.​

A team from Yale University has discovered a fungus deep in the South American rainforest that can live entirely on plastic - offering hope for new methods of waste disposal.

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Pestalotiopsis microspora, found in the jungles of Ecuador, can digest polyurethane - which often currently ends up in landfill and takes generations to decay.Burning polyurethane releases toxins as well as carbon dioxide; and, while it can be recycled, it frequently isn't.The fungus can live entirely on polyurethane. And, most intriguingly, the fungus can break down polyeurethane even without the presence of oxygen, meaning it could do its trick even at the bottom of a landfill site.The fungus was discovered on the university's annual Rainforest Expedition last year. It's one of several that the team found could brak down polyeurethane, but was the only one to manage this without oxygen."The broad distribution of activity observed and the unprecedented case of anaerobic growth using PUR as the sole carbon source suggest that endophytes are a promising source of biodiversity from which to screen for metabolic properties useful for bioremediation," the authors write.Jonathan Russell has isolated the enzyme that the fungus uses to degrade the polyeurethane, a serine hydrolase. He says it's it’s possible that this molecule alone could be useful in getting rid of waste polyurethane.

In scores of science fiction stories, hapless adventurers find themselves unwittingly introduced to the vacuum of space without proper protection. There is often an alarming cacophony of screams and gasps as the increasingly bloated humans writhe and spasm. Their exposed veins and eyeballs soon bulge in what is clearly a disagreeable manner. The ill-fated adventurers rapidly swell like over-inflated balloons, ultimately bursting in a gruesome spray of blood.
As is true with many subjects, this representation in popular culture does not reflect the reality of exposure to outer space. Ever since humanity first began to probe outside of our protective atmosphere, a number of live organisms have been exposed to vacuum, both deliberately and otherwise. By combining these experiences with our knowledge of outer space, scientists have a pretty clear idea of what would happen if an unprotected human slipped into the cold, airless void.

In the 1960s, as technology was bringing the prospect of manned spaceflight into reality, engineers recognized the importance of determining the amount of time astronauts would have to react to integrity breaches such as a damaged spacecraft or punctured space-suits. To that end, NASA constructed an assortment of large altitude chambers to mimic the hostile environments found at varying distances above the Earth, accounting for factors such as air pressure, temperature, and radiation. Adventurous volunteers were subjected to simulations of the conditions found several miles up, and a handful of animal tests were conducted with even lower pressures.
Using the data from these experiments and their knowledge of outer space, scientists were able to make some reasonable conclusions about how the human body would respond to sudden depressurization. A series of accidents over the years proved most of their extrapolations to be accurate. In 1965, in a space-suit test gone awry, a technician in an altitude chamber was exposed to a hard vacuum. The defective suit was unable to hold pressure, and the man collapsed after fourteen seconds. He regained consciousness shortly after the chamber was repressurized, and he was uninjured. In a later incident, another technician spent four minutes trapped at low pressure by a malfunctioning altitude chamber. He lost consciousness and began to turn blue, but escaped death when one of the managers kicked in one of the machine’s glass gauges, allowing air to seep into the chamber.

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Artist’s rendering of a Soviet Soyuz spacecraft​

In 1971, three Russian cosmonauts aboard an early Soyuz spacecraft tragically experienced the vacuum of space first-hand, as described in the Almanac of Soviet Manned Space Flight:“…the orbital module was normally separated by 12 pyrotechnic devices which were supposed to fire sequentially, but they incorrectly fired simultaneously, and this caused a ball joint in the capsule’s pressure equalization valve to unseat, allowing air to escape. The valve normally opens at low altitude to equalize cabin air pressure to the outside air pressure. This caused the cabin to lose all its atmosphere in about 30 seconds while still at a height of 168 km. In seconds, Patsayev realized the problem and unstrapped from his seat to try and cover the valve inlet and shut off the valve but there was little time left. It would take 60 seconds to shut off the valve manually and Patsayev managed to half close it before passing out. Dobrovolsky and Volkov were virtually powerless to help since they were strapped in their seats, with little room to move in the small capsule and no real way to assist Patsayev. The men died shortly after passing out. [...] The rest of the descent was normal and the capsule landed at 2:17 AM. The recovery forces located the capsule and opened the hatch only to find the cosmonauts motionless in their seats. On first glance they appeared to be asleep, but closer examination showed why there was no normal communication from the capsule during descent.”
When the human body is suddenly exposed to the vacuum of space, a number of injuries begin to occur immediately. Though they are relatively minor at first, they accumulate rapidly into a life-threatening combination. The first effect is the expansion of gases within the lungs and digestive tract due to the reduction of external pressure. A victim of explosive decompression greatly increases their chances of survival simply by exhaling within the first few seconds, otherwise death is likely to occur once the lungs rupture and spill bubbles of air into the circulatory system. Such a life-saving exhalation might be due to a shout of surprise, though it would naturally go unheard where there is no air to carry it.
In the absence of atmospheric pressure water will spontaneously convert into vapor, which would cause the moisture in a victim’s mouth and eyes to quickly boil away. The same effect would cause water in the muscles and soft tissues of the body to evaporate, prompting some parts of the body to swell to twice their usual size after a few moments. This bloating may result in some superficial bruising due to broken capillaries, but it would not be sufficient to break the skin.

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A NASA altitude chamber​

Within seconds the reduced pressure would cause the nitrogen which is dissolved in the blood to form gaseous bubbles, a painful condition known to divers as “the bends.” Direct exposure to the sun’s ultraviolet radiation would also cause a severe sunburn to any unprotected skin. Heat does not transfer out of the body very rapidly in the absence of a medium such as air or water, so freezing to death is not an immediate risk in outer space despite the extreme cold.
For about ten full seconds– a long time to be loitering in space without protection– an average human would be rather uncomfortable, but they would still have their wits about them. Depending on the nature of the decompression, this may give a victim sufficient time to take measures to save their own life. But this period of “useful consciousness” would wane as the effects of brain asphyxiation begin to set in. In the absence of air pressure the gas exchange of the lungs works in reverse, dumping oxygen out of the blood and accelerating the oxygen-starved state known as hypoxia. After about ten seconds a victim will experience loss of vision and impaired judgement, and the cooling effect of evaporation will lower the temperature in the victim’s mouth and nose to near-freezing. Unconsciousness and convulsions would follow several seconds later, and a blue discoloration of the skin called cyanosiswould become evident.
At this point the victim would be floating in a blue, bloated, unresponsive stupor, but their brain would remain undamaged and their heart would continue to beat. If pressurized oxygen is administered within about one and a half minutes, a person in such a state is likely make a complete recovery with only minor injuries, though the hypoxia-induced blindness may not pass for some time. Without intervention in those first ninety seconds, the blood pressure would fall sufficiently that the blood itself would begin to boil, and the heart would stop beating. There are no recorded instances of successful resuscitation beyond that threshold.
Though an unprotected human would not long survive in the clutches of outer space, it is remarkable that survival times can be measured in minutes rather than seconds, and that one could endure such an inhospitable environment for almost two minutes without suffering any irreversible damage. The human body is indeed a resilient machine.

Tough Problem? Drink UpAccording to new studies out of Albion College and University of Illinois at Chicago, intense focus might be getting in the way of deep insight. Subjects were sleep deprived, intoxicated, quizzed and studied to provide some interesting conclusions about the benefits of losing concentration and letting seemingly irrelevant signals take over the brain.

The creative upside of brain damage — the unexpected benefits of not being able to focus — does reveal something important about the imagination. Sometimes, it helps to consider irrelevant information, to eavesdrop on all the stray associations unfolding in the far reaches of the brain. We are more likely to find the answer because we have less control over where we look.​

In the Albion College study led by Mareike Wieth, 428 undergrads were surveyed about their sleeping patterns and the time of day the believed they were most efficient. Then they were given questions that demanded creative solutions.

When people were tested during their “least optimal time of day” — think of that night owl stumbling into the lab in the early morning — they were significantly more effective at solving insight puzzles. (On one problem, their performance increased by nearly 50 percent.) Performance on the analytic problems, meanwhile, was unaffected by the clock.​

The larger lesson is that those sleepy students, like a brain-damaged patient, benefit from the inability to focus. Their minds are drowsy and disorganized, humming with associations that they’d normally ignore. When we need an insight, of course, those stray associations are the source of the answer.​

A brand-new study by scientists at the University of Illinois at Chicago compared performance on insight puzzles between sober and drunk students. (They were aiming for real intoxication, giving students enough booze to achieve a blood alcohol level of 0.075.) Once the students achieved “peak intoxication” the scientists gave them a battery of word problems​

Drunk students solved more of these word problems in less time. They also were much more likely to perceive their solutions as the result of a sudden insight. And the differences were dramatic: The alcohol made subjects nearly 30 percent more likely to find the unexpected solution.​

This isn’t to say you should deprive yourself of sleep then pre-game your next critical exam or meeting. Rather, it points to the nature of creative solutions existing outside of structured and ordered systems. It’s an old method to find hidden answers by taking breaks, going on walks, or relaxing the mind. It seems sleep deprivation and intoxication can lead to similar ends.

There will always be a wild and unpredictable quality to creativity and invention, says Anthony McCaffrey, a cognitive psychology researcher at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, because an "Aha moment" is rare and reaching it means overcoming formidable mental obstacles. But after studying common roadblocks to problem-solving, he has developed a toolkit for enhancing anyone's skills.

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McCaffrey believes his Obscure Features Hypothesis (OFH) has led to the first systematic, step-by-step approach to devising innovation-enhancing techniques to overcome a wide range of cognitive obstacles to invention. His findings appear now in an early online issue of Psychological Science. McCaffrey, a post doctoral research fellow at the Center for e-Design at UMass Amherst and Virginia Tech, recently won a two-year, $170,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to turn his technique into software with a user-friendly graphical interface. Initial users will likely be engineers.Looking at more than 100 significant modern and 1,000 historical inventions, McCaffrey analyzed how successful inventors overcame various cognitive obstacles to uncover the key obscure information needed to solve problems. He found that almost all innovative solutions follow two steps, as articulated by the OFH: Noticing an infrequently-seen, obscure feature and second, building a solution based on that feature."I detected a pattern suggesting that something everyone else had overlooked often became the basis of an inventive solution," he says. So the cognitive psychologist with degrees in computer science and philosophy, who says all three disciplines "have come in very handy to approach this from different angles," set out to study aspects of human perception and cognition that inhibit our noticing obscure features."I felt that if I could understand why people overlook certain things, then develop techniques for them to notice much more readily what they were overlooking, I might have a chance to improve creativity."Psychologists use the term "functional fixedness" to describe the first mental obstacle McCaffrey investigated. It explains, for example, how one person finding burrs stuck to his sweater will typically say, "Ugh, a burr," while another might say, "Hmmm, two things lightly fastened together. I think I'll invent Velcro!" The first view is clouded by focusing on an object's typical function.

To overcome functional fixedness, McCaffrey sought a way to teach people to reinterpret known information about common objects. For each part of an object, the "generic parts technique" (GPT) asks users to list function-free descriptions, including its material, shape and size. Using this, the prongs of an electrical plug can be described in a function-free way to reveal that they might be used as a screwdriver, for example."The trick is how to unconceal the features relevant to your purposes," McCaffrey points out. The result of creating the function-free parts list is a tree diagram in which the description of each part does not imply a use, helping subjects see beyond common functions of any object and its parts.Using "insight problems" involving common objects because they require no special engineering knowledge, McCaffrey designed an experiment to test whether GPT improved problem solving in a group of 14 undergraduates trained in GPT compared to a control group of 14 who were not. Both groups were given insight problems commonly used in psychological testing, plus new ones designed by McCaffrey's colleagues.Overall, the GPT group solved 67.4 percent more problems than the control group, a dramatic and statistically significant improvement in performance. In a follow-up study asking subjects to list features for the same objects (independent of a problem), GPT-trained subjects listed the key obscure feature required for the solution 75 percent of the time compared to 27 percent for controls. This suggests it is not mere exposure to problems but rather the GPT that leads to uncovering the key obscure feature more often.Two ideas from his philosophy background helped him think about such problems in a broad way, McCaffrey says. In Nietzsche, McCaffrey found his broad definition of "feature" that doesn't limit a theory of creativity. From Heidegger, he borrowed the notion of "unconcealment," the idea that any object can have an unlimited number of features that are gradually unconcealed within an endless array of contexts."I was an elementary school teacher for several years," McCaffrey adds. "With these ideas bubbling around in my brain, I gave my students a steady stream of puzzles and observed carefully when they were getting stuck." Eventually, he decided it was time for him to formally and scientifically study how people overcome these mental obstacles."I want to help people to notice things consciously that they might not otherwise see, and remain open to the possibilities. Noticing is one thing, and building on it or connecting it to other things is the next step. Some of this can be learned and we now have a discipline for it." He is already looking at other obstacles and plans to publish a series of innovation-enhancing techniques to address as many as two dozen distinct creativity blocks caused by the normal function of our perceptual and cognitive systems.Provided by University of Massachusetts at Amherst

Lake Vostok has been isolated from the surface for millions of years, and many hope it contains bizarre new life forms. At present, however, that seems unlikely. The drillers have already sampled wedges of accretion ice – lake water that has naturally frozen onto the underside of the ice sheet – and although some researchers claim it contains bacteria, others write this off as contamination.

Lake Vostok has been isolated from the surface for millions of years, and many hope it contains bizarre new life forms. At present, however, that seems unlikely. The drillers have already sampled wedges of accretion ice – lake water that has naturally frozen onto the underside of the ice sheet – and although some researchers claim it contains bacteria, others write this off as contamination.

GOVERNMENT spooks want cyborg insects to snoop on their enemies. Biologists want to tap into the nervous systems of insects to understand how they fly. A probe that can be implanted into moths to control their flight could help satisfy both parties. One day, it could even help rehabilitate people who have had strokes.
The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has been running a programme to develop machine-insect interfaces for years but electrodes implanted to stimulate the brains or wing muscles of insects were not precise enough. Now Joel Voldman of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and colleagues have designed a unique, flexible neural probe that can be attached directly to an insect's ventral nerve cord (VNC), which, along with the brain, makes up the central nervous system in insects.

ScienceDaily (Feb. 9, 2012) — If there was a 'Just So' story for how the zebra got its stripes, I'm sure that Rudyard Kipling would have come up with an amusing and entertaining camouflage explanation. But would he have come up with the explanation that Gábor Horváth and colleagues from Hungary and Sweden have: that zebra's stripes stave off blood-sucking insects?​

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The team publishes their discovery that zebra stripes is the least attractive hide pattern for voracious horsefiles in the Journal of Experimental Biology athttp://jeb.biologists.org/.

Horseflies (tabanids) deliver nasty bites, carry disease and distract grazing animals from feeding. According to Horváth, these insects are attracted to horizontally polarized light because reflections from water are horizontally polarized and aquatic insects use this phenomenon to identify stretches of water where they can mate and lay eggs. However, blood-sucking female tabanids are also guided to victims by linearly polarized light reflected from their hides. Explaining that horseflies are more attracted to dark horses than to white horses, the team also points out that developing zebra embryos start out with a dark skin, but go on to develop white stripes before birth. The team wondered whether the zebra's stripy hide might have evolved to disrupt their attractive dark skins and make them less appealing to voracious bloodsuckers, such as tabanids.​

Travelling to a horsefly-infested horse farm near Budapest, the team tested how attractive these blood-sucking insects found black and white striped patterns by varying the width, density and angle of the stripes and the direction of polarization of the light that they reflected. Trapping attracted insects with oil and glue, the team found that the patterns attracted fewer flies as the stripes became narrower, with the narrowest stripes attracting the fewest tabanids.​

The team then tested the attractiveness of white, dark and striped horse models. Suspecting that the striped horse would attract an intermediate number of flies between the white and dark models, the team was surprised to find that the striped model was the least attractive of all.​

Finally, when the team measured the stripe widths and polarization patterns of light reflected from real zebra hides, they found that the zebra's pattern correlated well with the patterns that were least attractive to horseflies.​

"We conclude that zebras have evolved a coat pattern in which the stripes are narrow enough to ensure minimum attractiveness to tabanid flies," says the team and they add, "The selection pressure for striped coat patterns as a response to blood-sucking dipteran parasites is probably high in this region [Africa]."​

4.Scientists sound alarm over threat of untreatable gonorrhea in United States5.You have one minute to live in a vacuum in space.6.Drinking and sleep deprevation helps solve complex problems.7. Anyone can be more inventive, by a process.8. Deep underground lake untouched for 2.5 million years9. Nerve probe on insects to understand flying mechanisms.10. Zebras got their stripes to ward of insects.

February 12, 2012 by Cathryn DeludeFor roughly two thousand years, Chinese herbalists have treated Malaria using a root extract, commonly known as Chang Shan, from a type of hydrangea that grows in Tibet and Nepal. More recent studies suggest that halofuginone, a compound derived from this extract's bioactive ingredient, could be used to treat many autoimmune disorders as well. Now, researchers from the Harvard School of Dental Medicine have discovered the molecular secrets behind this herbal extract's power.http://www.physorg.com/news/2012-02-scientists-molecular-secrets-year-old-chinese.html

Researchers have unearthed a forest in northern China preserved under a layer of ash deposited 300 million years ago.
Preservation of the forest, just west of the Inner Mongolian district of Wuda, has been likened to that of the Italian city of Pompeii.
The researchers were able to "reconstruct" nearly 1,000 sq m of the forest's trees and plant distributions.
This rare insight into how the region once looked is described in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The excavations sampled three sites across a large expanse that was covered with about a metre of ash.
Due to the pristine preservation of some of the plants, the team estimate the ash fell over the course of just a few days, felling and damaging some of the trees and plants under its weight but otherwise keeping them intact.
"It's marvelously preserved," said study co-author Hermann Pfefferkorn of the University of Pennsylvania in the US.
"We can stand there and find a branch with the leaves attached, and then we find the next branch and the next branch and the next branch. And then we find the stump from the same tree. That's really exciting."
The team identified six groups of trees, ranging from low-lying tree ferns to now-extinct 25m trees Sigillaria and Cordaites, as well well-preserved specimens of another extinct group called Noeggerathiales.
Based on the findings, the team worked with a painter to depict what the forest would have looked like before the ash cloud descended.
Prof Pfefferkorn said that, as a particularly complete and well-caught moment in time, the forest would serve as a "baseline" for assessing future finds.
"It's like Pompeii," he said. "Pompeii gives us deep insight into Roman culture, but it doesn't say anything about Roman history in and of itself.
"But on the other hand, it elucidates the time before and the time after. This finding is similar. It's a time capsule and therefore it allows us now to interpret what happened before or after much better."

What's the chance that the breath you just inhaled contains at least one air molecule that was in Julius Caesar's last breath--the one in which he said (according to Shakespeare) "Et tu Brute? Then die Caesar"?​

Assume that the more than two thousand years that have passed have been enough time for all the molecules in Caesar's last breath to mix evenly in the atmosphere, and that only a trivial amount of the molecules have leaked out into the oceans or the ground. Assume further that there are about 1044 molecules of air, and about 2 x 1022molecules in each breath--yours or Caesar's.​

That gives a chance of 2 x 1022/1044 = 2x 10-22 that any one particular molecule you breathe in came from Caesar's last breath. This means that the probability that any one particular molecule did not come from Caesar's last breath is [1-2x10-22]. But we want the probability that the first molecule did not come from Caesar's last breath and that the second molecule and that the third molecule and so forth. To determine the probability of not just one thing but of a whole bunch of things that are causally unconnected happening together, we multiply the individual probabilities. Since there are 2x10-22 different molecules, and since each has the same [1-2x10-22] chance of not coming from Caesar's last breath, we need to multiply the probability of any single event--[1-2x10-22]--by itself 2x1022 times. That gives us:​

[1-2x10-22][2x10^22]​

as the probability that none of the molecules in the breath you just inhaled (assuming you are still holding out) came from Julius Caesar's last breath.​

How to evaluate this? Recall that if a number x is small, then (1-x) is approximately equal to e-x, where e=2.718281828... is the so-called base of the natural logarithms. So we can rewrite the equation above as:​

[e[-2x10^(-22)]][2x10^(22)]​

And remember that when we raise numbers with exponents to further exponents, we simply multiply the exponents together. In this case, one exponent (the chance that a molecule came from Caesar) is very small, and the other (the number of molecules in a breath) is very large. When we multiply them together, we get: [-2x10(-22)] x [2x10(22)] = -4. e-4 is approximately 1/(2.72 x 2.72 x 2.72 x 2.72) = 1/54.7 = 0.018.​

Thus there is a 1.8% chance that none of the molecules you are (still) holding in your lungs came from Caesar's last breath. And there is a 98.2% chance that at least one of the molecules in your lungs came from Caesar's last breath.​

Click to expand...

Thanks! Now I know who to blame for my strep throat. Son of a bitch is lucky that Brutus did the job first.

For roughly two thousand years, Chinese herbalists have treated Malaria using a root extract, commonly known as Chang Shan, from a type of hydrangea that grows in Tibet and Nepal. More recent studies suggest that halofuginone, a compound derived from this extract's bioactive ingredient, could be used to treat many autoimmune disorders as well. Now, researchers from the Harvard School of Dental Medicine have discovered the molecular secrets behind this herbal extract's power.http://www.physorg.com/news/2012-02-scientists-molecular-secrets-year-old-chinese.html

Click to expand...

I started taking this stuff 2 weeks ago for my stomach and Hashimoto's Thyroiditis. Will report back in 4 months.

Children who play with puzzles between ages 2 and 4 later develop better spatial skills, a study by University of Chicago researchers has found. Puzzle play was found to be a significant predictor of spatial skill after controlling for differences in parents' income, education and the overall amount of parent language input.​

Cigarette smoke has long been considered the main risk factor for heart disease. But new research from Brown University in Providence, R.I., shows that nicotine itself, a component of cigarette smoke, can contribute to the disease process by changing cell structure in a way that promotes migration and invasion of the smooth muscle cells that line blood vessels. In particular, invading cells can remodel structures called podosomes, and this leads to further degradation of vessel integrity.http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-02-invade-conquer-nicotine-role-heart.html

Children who play with puzzles between ages 2 and 4 later develop better spatial skills, a study by University of Chicago researchers has found. Puzzle play was found to be a significant predictor of spatial skill after controlling for differences in parents' income, education and the overall amount of parent language input.​